'Sons of Anarchy' Season Six Finale: Marijuana, Fork Stabbing and Death

The 'Sons of Anarchy' season six finale was one of the most harrowing pieces of television in 2013.

The Sons of Anarchy season six finale was some showstopper. Completely at odds with the subtle beauty of Breaking Bad's wrap-up episode, the FX drama went the whole hog and we had a drowning, a stabbing and two rather bloody deaths. SPOILERS AHEAD. Obviously.

The Sons of Anarchy season six finale saw Tara (Maggie Siff) lying stone cold dead in her kitchen as a crying Jax (Charlie Humman) cradled her in his arms. Her killer was none other than Gemma (Katey Sagal) who, under the influence of marijuana, drowned her in the sink, stabbed her repeatedly and left her to bleed. Lovely.

The death became all the more jarring given Jax had allowed Tara to take their sons away on her own terms while he served time for providing guns to a kid who went gun-crazy at an elementary school in the season opener.

Elsewhere in the bloody finale, Eli Roosevelt (Rockond Dunbar) is shot to death by Juice (Theo Rossi) after witnessing Gemma's crime.

During an intimate screening on Tuesday, Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter said that both Maggie and Katey exited the room crying after the episode.

"Obviously it's a major shift in the mythology and I knew ultimately where I wanted to take Jax in that final season," Sutter said, according to MTV, "I wanted to remove his true north for that last season."

The Sons of Anarchy Season 6 Premiere Hit Audiences Hard

In an interview last week, Sagal explained how the cast and crew dealt with the goodbyes.

"It's very emotional for all of us when any of us goes down, and there's a lot of people that have gone down and probably will continue," Sagal said. "We have a post mortem process about that. We usually, on the day that we know a character is going to be offed, everybody shows up on set. We have a dinner usually for that particular character."

Recalling that final scene at the Q&A screening, Siff - with tears in her eyes - said, "Because the character kind of ends, my experience of shooting it was really about feeling everything around me, which was Katey and then Charlie [Hunnam]. That was really painfully hard, this sense of loss is really the people you leave behind. I was so aware of their loss but it wasn't about me; it was about them. It was very surreal."

Sons of Anarchy has already been renewed for season 7, which should hit screens in the Fall 2014 - providing Hunnam doesn't do a U-turn on the whole Fifty Shades thing.